In Wolf Hall, people’s clothes are a reflection of their motivations and desires—particularly the ones that they want the world to see. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey has a great fondness for fine silks and velvets. His luxurious tastes contradict his position as a man of God, but he delights in expensive garments and flaunts them because he knows he is too powerful for anyone to object, and he wants everyone to notice that power. Queen Katherine’s gowns are “bristling with gemstones” and seem “as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword.” Like her clothes, Katherine has no use for beauty and shows strength and resolve as she fights against the king’s decision to divorce her. Throughout, clothing is a way for people to control what they show the world and hide away their flaws and vulnerabilities. This is why Wolsey tells Cromwell that he must learn to “find out what people wear under their clothes.” In some cases, people’s hidden selves match their outward appearances—most notably, the religious fanatic Thomas More wears a hair shirt under his clothes, which highlights the masochistic pleasure he takes in suffering and martyrdom. But in other cases, clothing masks underlying weakness; for instance, Wolsey ultimately loses his power and influence, despite his confident appearance. Overall, clothes symbolize aspects of characters’ selves that they want to reveal while also helping them conceal the things they want hidden.
Clothes Quotes in Wolf Hall
This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out […] the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. […] There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, “Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!”
[…] So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.
How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it’s not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, […] [and] Wolsey’s unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a secret labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.
There never was a lady who knew better her husband’s needs.
She knows them; for the first time, she doesn’t want to comply with them.
Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admires Katherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is faded and streaked with gray, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.
Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! Says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.
Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell’s, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. […]
We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.
He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.
When the Loller was led out between the officers the people jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she did that herself, in desperation at her sin. Behind the Loller came two monks, parading like fat gray rats, crosses in their pink paws. The woman in the clean cap […] balled her two hands into fists and punched them in the air, and from the depth of her belly she let loose a scream, a halloo, in a shrill voice like a demon. The press of people took up the cry.
“Look,” she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, “Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well. […] Why don’t you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. […] I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. […]”
“If I were your father…no…” he rephrases it, “if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.”
Clothes Symbol Timeline in Wolf Hall
